Facts and opinions related to the reprographics business and the reprographics industry as well as articles and information related to the A/E/C industry served by reprographers. This blog is intended for reprographers, for vendors who sell to reprographers and for analysts and investors who are interested in learning more about the reprographics industry. (YOU CAN CONTACT THE BLOG AUTHOR at joel.salus@mac.com or at joel.salus@me.com)

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

On November 17th, I put up a post about an RFP opportunity from the LA USD for “scanning, archiving, document control and other related services”, and, yesterday, one of the purchasing department people e-mailed me a link to the “vendor selections” made by LA USD for this procurement.

You can click on the link immediately below to access the previous post about that RFP opportunity:

(1)Evidently, LA USD decided to make a “multiple award” for this procurement, meaning that several vendors (in this case, five different vendors) will be awarded contracts to perform services.

(2)Evidently, all of the five vendors are “SBE-qualified” firms; I’m pretty sure that SBE stands for “Small Business Enterprise”; perhaps the RFP stated that the procurement opportunity would be limited to SBE- qualified firms, but I don’t know that for sure since I did not read the RFP document.If LA USD did limit participation to only SBE-qualified vendors, that’s a decision that’s generally not in the best interests of taxpayers, because, when you limit competition for an RFP of this nature, that generally means that the purchaser (in this case, LA USD) will not benefit from the absolute lowest cost possible.In these times, when cities and counties are facing major budget problems, it is essential to open up RFP (and other bidding) opportunities to “all” qualified vendors, large, small and otherwise.

(3)I was very surprised that no reprographers showed up on the vendor-selection list!Did that happen because RFP participation was limited to only SBE-qualified firms?Or, did that happen because no reprographers were aware of this RFP opportunity?

Archive of Blog-posts on Repro 101 when Repro 101 was hosted on IRgA web-site

To access the archive of blog posts that were put up on Reprographics 101 when Repro 101 was hosted on the IRgA web-site, go to the blog-post put up on May 31st, 2013, and, when you locate that blog-post, you will find a list of the pdf files that contain those previous blog-posts, as well as "links" to each pdf file.

About Me

40+ year involvement in the reprographics business and industry. Former Chairman/CEO of Rowley-Scher Reprographics, Former Senior Vice President & Chief Business Strategist of National Graphic Imaging (NGI). Former Managing Director of the International Reprographics Association (IRgA). Active as a Management Consultant to firms in the reprographics business. (My consulting practice is called ProActive Management Programs LLC.)